Lowly Ascent

Following the screams, Darla, with Cain on her shoulder, left the experiment room.

Darla wished to leave, her mind formulating something similar to what Cain already guessed. But with her being Cain's Marked, she understood leaving wasn't an option.

Instead, the two went to the next room, creeping open the door. They found no one on the other side and so they took a look around.

This room was bigger than the other, with a whole habitat in the wall. Inside, monkey corpses littered around dried trunks.

There was additional surgical equipment and a cooler filled with vials of unknown substances. In the corner, there was a chair fitted for the body of an ape, strapped with wires and a strange hat of sorts, made of steel and more wiring.

Again, Darla found an audio transmitter and played it. It was a young and enthusiastic voice this time.

"This is Doctor Braun, Doctor Ivan had to step out. He's been feeling ill due to his old age. Project Daydream is going well. We successfully made a method for making apes' minds similar to humans, we can delay the human trials for a time. This is after all for the betterment of Humanity, we shouldn't kill our own so soon.

"Anyway, Doctor Ivan made improvements to the drug. We found the apes entered a state of dreaming, similar to what people under X experience. But if we want to connect these so-called "dream worlds" together and make it into a network for global communication and even possible immortality... we need more materials and resources, machinery included. I know it will be hard to deliver such things due to our team's safe and obscure location, but with the equipment we have, we can't go into deeper research. In this audio file is my full report, encoded per usual."

The player stopped, and the two spent the time in silence thinking.

Cain was the first to figure out what was going on in this place, not that it wasn't already obvious but Darla didn't know much about such supernatural and occult things. She was an outsider to her cult, not yet grown up to take on more responsibility and secrets.

'Are they trying to replicate the Dream Realm? But that place only worked due to the core and the presence of the Horrors, balancing it all out. What these people are doing seems to lean toward creating a space only for humans. It's not necessarily bad, they should be using the Path of the Soul for a baseline on how it operates, it's possible if it's for communication. But immortality....impossible.'

It was a tall order to accomplish immortality. No great mind ever figured it out, perhaps it didn't exist.

Cain didn't care for such secrets, he would uncover all once he had everything in the palm of his hand. But for these scientists, these humans, they didn't know, they couldn't know.

The ceiling was high, and most humans existed in the basement.

After collecting themselves for a few minutes, the two entered the hall, but this time, the door at the end opened.

"Notify Doctor Braun I'm close to completing the first stage. We should get more funding from the Bureau at that time. Also, ask for another batch of drug addicts."

An elderly man swaggered out of a brightly lit room. It was hard to tell what was on the other side, but the elderly man's hands were covered in blood.

"Of course Doctor Ivan." The woman walking beside Ivan branched off into a different hallway.

Darla held her breath as Cain pecked her to go back into the room with the apes. She moved fast and they hid just before Doctor Ivan's eyes left the woman's figure. The two sat still, not breathing as he walked by.

'What to do? Seeing him, I can get a sense of his personality. He's also not walked any paths from as far as I can tell.'

Cain's soul energy had enveloped Doctor Ivan, the man had no countermeasures and Cain got a feel for him as a person, using his soul to scout another.

After Doctor Ivan passed, Cain directed Darla back into the hallway. They ignored the other rooms and went straight into the one at the end of the hall, where Doctor Ivan came from.

Pushing open the unlocked door, they entered a bright decontamination chamber. Both Darla and Cain didn't know the purpose of the room and went to the other side where an airtight sealed door blocked their path.

Next to the door was a red button, Darla pushed it, and the door behind them closed.

"Decontamination in process, please wait."

A clear spray entered the chamber, covering Cain and Darla. Next, warm air blew in their faces and dried them. When it was over, the door opened, and on the other side was a surgery room.

"I-I think I'm going to throw up." Darla covered her mouth.

In a slanted operating chair, there was a young man completely opened up. Needles installed in the armrest pierced into his flesh and his chest was wide open. The pair could see the man's moving lungs and beating heart. He was still alive.

"H-Help..." He wheezed, the veins in his body turning into strange colors. Most notably purple, pink, orange, and yellow.

The man groaned as he moved his head, motioning the two to look at a terminal connected to the chair. Darla walked over and saw there was an open entry on it.

'So they started human trials. And this guy isn't the first.' Cain's eyes went down the lines of words already typed down.

The entry spoke of how there were a few minor breakthroughs. The scientists improved the aspect of the drug where people could connect their minds under its influence. The users could go from one dream world to another and back to wake.

The only issue was that if they woke up still in someone else's dream, the two people's minds conjoined. One of the bodies would die while the other received two people inside it, slowly and painfully becoming one.

Cain immediately knew what the problem was from reading the entry.

'This isn't something they can fix with a drug. If the dream worlds have individuals ruling them, who cannot oversee these worlds properly, then they can't remove others before they wake up. These dream worlds seem to work off the basis of the subconscious, which isn't the smartest choice; there will be a lack of control.'

'When someone goes to another dream world, their soul will exit their body and go into another, it's like going to someone else's house, just far more personal and dangerous in this case.'

As someone who had to deal with sharing a soul, Cain knew the struggles of the issue. The only difference was that the people joining other dream worlds were treated as invaders when the dream ended, it didn't cause two people to live in one body but something similar to possession.

The entry stated that a muddled personality is typically created, like how some Fusion Stage cultivators merged their minds with the souls they harnessed for an easier advancement, only, worse.

'This process is painful for the mind, the resulting individual becomes a retard and has aggressive tendencies, saying phrases and calling out names. There's even a record of one of them trying to clean on account of one of the merged participants being a neat freak. Unfortunately undoing this process is impossible, it becomes a situation like my own, more unstable, but identical.'

The entry on the terminal also spoke about how the scientists had no idea how to merge the dream worlds to create a coherent foundation for an overarching net of minds. They needed a binder but couldn't think of one, it would require something in the occult no doubt.

This exposition confused Cain, 'What do they mean they can't find a binder? Can't they use a powerful figure in the Soul Path? By then they should have a strong mindscape and an understanding of themselves. Unless a mindscape couldn't work? After all, my own relies on the cores to be so strong, but someone in the augmentation stage should at least be able to do it. If wholeness is already a foundation then the stage after that should be able to fill the role right?'

He was perplexed, Cain may not be a master in souls but he was a master of his own. He knew the benefits of a mindscape, although one had to use specific methods to access it, it wasn't hard to achieve.

People mastered their bodies and minds, and the mindscape was the foundation of the mind, almost anyone who dealt in such a path could access it.

However, it was unlikely many people had such access to it as Cain, he had Animum which was perfect for a conduit of transference, he didn't need to meditate or use a ritual as a medium. His mindscape was also more physical than others, having the dream core helped in that endeavor.

Honestly, Cain was monstrous in the foundation of his soul, he devoured countless people which fueled him, had a core that reinforced the soul, and had a perfect conduit for entering it as a trigger, being the mist.

Truthfully, he didn't need such a trigger after the dream core came into play, since he could use distortion or imagination for the same effect. Animum was only useful for killing at this point. 

Comparing Cain to the majority was foolish, someone in the augmentation stage wouldn't even have a tenth of what Cain's soul was capable of.

If only he was not sparse on energy, Cain wouldn't need to walk the Path of the Soul. Although the strange properties it brought were interesting, even if what the path gave him weakened after he left this place, it was no doubt helpful in advancing his control over his soul.

Thinking of all this, Cain second-guessed if someone in the soul path could act as a binding for thousands of minds as the scientists wanted.

But his thinking froze as he heard the decontamination sequence start.